Properties, such as vacation rental property, rental homes, rental condos and the like, may often have duplicate property listings that are listed on different property listing resources, such as different databases, different web sites, different rental agencies, or different property management systems, for example. In some examples, a property owner and/or an agent acting on behalf of an owner may list the same property on different property listing resources, resulting in multiple property listings that are associated with the same property. In some examples, the different property listing resources may be geographically diverse (e.g., in different countries). In other examples, the different property listing resources may be operated by a common corporate entity under different brand names. In yet other examples, the different property listing resources may be operated by different corporate entities. However, there may be duplicate property listings that exist among different property listing resources within the same corporate entity and/or among different property listing resources of different corporate entities. The duplication may be due to owners and/or agents posting their property listings among a variety of property listing resources, some within the same company but spread across different brands operated by the company and/or spread across one or more brands of different companies.
In some examples, one company having X property listings may acquire or may be acquired by another company having Y property listings. Due to a real possibility of duplication in property listings between the two companies, it may be unknown or not readily discernible how many of their respective property listings are duplicates and how many are actually property listings that are unique to each company. Accordingly, an accurate monetary valuation of the unique property listings of the company to be acquired may be difficult unless duplicate property listings are factored out of the valuation.
Duplicate property listings may require more data storage space and may make searches for property listings more compute intensive, time consuming, and less accurate due to duplication of property listings that may be output as search results. In some examples, an owner or agent who has listed a property may be removed by a property listing service or website due to failure to pay fees (e.g., listing fees) or due to posting fraudulent property listings. An example of a fraudulent listing may include a scenario where photos and/or other information for another property listing are used to represent the property listing that was posted. For example, if the fraudulent owner/agent has a dive property to list, they may use photos and/or other information taken from a nicer listing to represent the dive listing. It may be difficult to detect the use of misrepresented information associated with a property listing. Further, if the fraud is detected and the offending entity is barred from posting new listings, that entity may nevertheless use a new user name, new password, new email address or other form of access credentials to establish a new account from which fraudulent listing may again be posted using fake information, such as photos and the like.
Thus, there is a need for systems, methods and software to detect and identify duplicate property listings.